A note on Piaget's concept of conservation.

Abstract

In his discourse on the development of the number concept Piaget (x) gives central emphasis to the concept of conservation as an essential principle that forms the basis for a framework of numerical reasoning. He describes conservation as developing in three stages: an initial stage in which perceptual factors exclusively determine the judgment of quantity, an intermediate stage of transition when perceptual as well as conservation considerations influence the judgment, and finally a last stage of complete conservation. These stages are, according to Piaget, one manifestation of a general trend from a perceptual-intuitive to an operational orientation, which characterizes the development of conceptual thinking. Some of the most thoughtful experimental analyses of Piaget's theoretical speculations regarding the development of number concept have been recently conducted by Wohlwill (3, 4). In an attempt to gain some further understanding of the factors that contribute to the development of the principle of conservation, Wohlwill and Lowe (4) report a study in which they evaluated the relative contribution of three forms of specific training on the development of conservational thinking. The three experimental conditions of training were: (a) Reinforced Practice-S determined the number of objects immediately before and immediately after their spatial arrangement (in terms of their spread in a horizontal line) had been changed; (b) Addition and Subtraction-S was trained in observing the effects of addition or subtraction of one object from a larger aggregate on the determination of the number of such objects after their spatial arrangement had been changed; and (c) Dissociation-S received practice in counting an aggregate of objects